ABSTRACT
Healthcare services covers wide range of services as well as the management of health problems within a community. Healthcare services are designed to meet the needs of communities through the use of available health facilities with health manpower carrying out their professional duties. The study determined the undergraduate students’ level of awareness of availability of healthcare services; perceptions of undergraduate students on healthcare services in the university’s medical centre. The study also ascertained undergraduate students’ level of utilization as well as the factors influencing utilization of healthcare services by undergraduate students in the university medical Centre. Cross sectional descriptive study designs using multi-stage sampling technique were used to select 7 faculties that were used for the study. A 30- item structured questionnaire was used to generate data from 420 randomly selected students in university of Calabar and there was response rate of 97.9% (411 respondents). The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 was used for the analysis and results were presented in tables and charts. The majority of respondents 55.7% were between aged 18-22 years, with most 53.5% being females. Most of the respondents 96.1% were aware about the medical centre with 60.6% who heard about the medical centre through orientation. A greater proportion of the respondents 61.3% were not aware of the Tertiary Institutions Social Health Insurance Scheme (TISHIP) where the healthcare of students is paid from funds pooled through the contributions of both students and government. In addition, 56.2% agreed that the time spent in waiting for treatment is too long and 33.4% agreed that essential drugs were not always available at the Medical centre. Most of the respondents 64.2% knew that they were eligible to access healthcare services at the medical centre while 35.8% did not know. 17.5% indicated that they have visited the medical centre once in 2019/2020 & 2020/2021 sessions. The most common type of illness that made students utilized healthcare services was malaria and typhoid (46.5%). Furthermore, the factors that influenced the utilization of healthcare services were lack of drugs & other consumables (69.6%), distance of the health centre (51.3%) and long waiting time (45.5%). The study indicated that there is need to strengthen enlightenment program to undergraduate students about Tertiary Institutions School Health Insurance Programme (TISHIP) and there is need to also develop a customer/ patient feedback mechanism at the medical centre to access client satisfaction and improve the delivery of services.
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